


Intelligent Silence

by PlaguedParadox



Series: The Silent Courier [5]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Happy Ending, Implied Relationships, Mentions of character history, Mentions of surgery, Muteness, Old World Blues DLC, Well as happy as Fallout can be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 15:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15933485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaguedParadox/pseuds/PlaguedParadox
Summary: Pandora finds herself trying to programme a way of getting her voice back while in the Big MT.





	Intelligent Silence

The lights of the crater were certainly a sight to behold at the top of the dome that was labeled the Think Tank. Big Mountain was the courier’s second home, her own small private place to collect her thoughts away from the scum that were raiders and the Legion and the infighting of the NCR. The mute courier adored the scenery of the land below her and rather enjoyed wandering around the entrance to the Forbidden Zone where she’d gaze and examine the large red glowing gems that clung to the walls and occasionally poke at some of the broken robotic scorpions that she destroyed on her first visit to the area. The scientists of the Think Tank, despite knowing Pandora’s ability to survive and capability in the wild, constantly warned her of the threats that lurked at the Forbidden Zone but the courier paid no attention as she could easily just walk in and speak to the resident scientist of the Forbidden Zone but of course she remembered the pain Dr Mobius’s robots caused her, the Robo Scorpions were an arse to deal with as they usually attacked in large numbers but as the hunks of metal that dotted the crater proved, the courier would win eventually. 

The courier loved most parts of the crater, apart from where the cazadors lived, she despised that place with more than just a burning passion. Roxie’s barking pulled the courier’s attention away from the view and back towards the Sink where the AI were all bickering once again, a chuckle bubbled up and made the courier bounce as she walked into the main room of the Sink, greeting the AIs with a small, barely audible murmur but they still heard. Pandora’s voice was slowly recovering with the help of the Auto Doc and the scientists, mainly Dr 0 and Dr 8 as they felt like they owed her more than the other scientists. The courier made her way over to the female cyberdog and gently patted the dog’s side, avoiding the metal embedded into the body. The mute woman found it rather ironic that she was mute with her original name being Vera and one of her friend’s was mute originally but was given a woman named Vera’s voice. Pandora’s attention was pulled back over to the doors leading out into the crater and the Think Tank before noticing that Roxie was now pawing at the door leading to the latter, a small gulp bobbed the courier’s scarred throat as she made her way through the door and made her way down to the labs below. The doctors were oddly not floating at their usual stations but seemed to be surrounding Dr 0’s station, where the courier would usually collect scrap metal as the scientist had a horrible habit of breaking things. 

Pandora opened her mouth to ask what was going on, forgetting her condition and only being reminded when a strained sound left her lips with coughing following soon after. “Ah… Little Teddy bear, come here.” Dr Dala called, her voice always seeming like she was trying to be seductive but the courier couldn’t help but be slightly freaked out by the monitors and sight of the floating brain inside it’s case. Pandora reluctantly made her way over to the floating brains, keeping her distance from the female scientist and instead standing by the scientist who also had a problem with his voice, Dr 8. “Our colleague, Dr 0, believes he’s found a way to fix your… vocal problem, my Little Teddy bear.” The scientist cooed out, creeping the courier out as she usually did. Dr 0 was quick to begin explaining his hypothesis and how he was hoping by creating and then giving the Auto Doc a more specific routine that was focused on the vocal cords that it AI could fix the problem caused by the trauma. They had run plenty of psychiatric evaluations to know that most of the mental trauma had gone so they could only pin her troubles on the physical portion of the trauma. The scientists murmured to each other about how simple that the solution was but then 0 admitted that there was one small problem, none of them knew how to create a programming routine for the Auto Doc which was to be expected as the Auto Doc was down to Dr Mobius. Pandora began to fiddle with the pip-boy on her arm, making a note that she needed to find a way to create the programming routine and then making the note and marking it as optional that she could talk to the usually drug fuelled scientist. 

Soon the courier was out and wandering the crater, struggling to calm the military cyberdogs that were close to attacking her as she walked by. The courier remembered where the Auto Docs were made and ran to find the building, hoping that she could find at least find something to programme the routine on so she could transfer it to the Auto Doc in the Sink. While talking to Dr Mobius was probably was a good idea, she didn’t know what drugs he would be on when she got there which made him unpredictable. The courier’s hand ran gently across the pale pink scar that ran across her neck, she couldn’t even remember what her voice sounded like and wanted to be able to speak to her friends desperately, her signing could only convey so much. Excitement bubbled through her as she searched the old facility, Pandora was hopeful that luck would be a lady for her in this situation. 

After almost a day of programming, the courier was tired, hungry and frustrated. She knew the medical field well due to what Arcade and several others had taught her but to know exactly what damaged was needed to be fixed? She’d need a prewar doctor with advanced knowledge and experience for that. Pandora groaned lowly to herself, glaring at the barely working terminal screen in front of her as if it was mocking her, she got the thing working with relative ease but the old electronics were going to act up no matter what she did. ‘If only fixing humans were as easy as fixing machines.’ She lamented to herself, her hand now running across her scarred neck. ‘Perhaps I should of grabbed Cade before I used the Transportalponder. What a stupid name for a device…’ The courier joked to herself as she began typing on the terminal once again, reviewing and correcting the previously written but incomplete programming as she went.  

Several more hours went by before the woman called it quits for the time being, not wanting to resort to draining her stash of nuka cola and mentats to keep her going as she had been growing the stash since her escape from the Legion, something that always seemed to concern her beloved medic but she just shrugged it off, it wasn’t as if she was just going to consume them all in one go, though it was tempting and she did have a small stash of fixer for the mentats addiction, granted the stash of medical goods were usually used for donating to the Followers. The walk back to the Think Tank was more laborious than the courier had remembered but Pandora chalked it up to how exhausted she was, she was used to staying up for dangerous periods of time to the point it had become normal for her but she had stayed awake even longer than that so as soon as she laid on the bed in the Sink, she was out like a light. 

The courier groaned as she was awoken by the sound of Muggy ranting and raving about mugs while he laid happily in his mug pile that the courier went out of her way to grow. She was strangely attached to the small securitron, his odd personality being quite entertaining and she even thanked the disastrous Dr 0 for making him at one point. “Muggy, please shut up!” The bedroom light-switch called out once the female AI noticed the courier beginning to move off of the bed, that and Muggy had been ranting for about an hour and it was driving her crazy. The courier made a small noise of thanks, the most she could muster without her throat aching, before she strapped on her stealth suit and pip-boy and headed back off into the dusty old crater to try and finish off the programming the best she could. Pandora looked off at the horizon, her thoughts a mess of hopeful wishes as she began to think of all the things she could say to her friends once the Auto Doc was done fixing her. Her lips curled into a smile as she threw her bag strap over her shoulder, it just contained a few bottles of sarsaparilla and water and a few snacks to get her by as she made her way back through the crater and to the terminal she had worked at a few hours before. Pandora had a small plan in mind but it meant that she had to disappear out of the crater’s ‘safe’ zone and talk to Dr Mobius as he hopefully wouldn’t be drugged up so early in the morning but she could only hope, he was very unpredictable during their meetings but he was always a good source of mentats. The trip to the Forbidden Zone was always calming to the courier when she wasn’t tripping over parts of broken robots and red crystals that coated the ground. A huff left her lips as she landed on the ground once again, soon a muted hissing left the courier as her knees stung as she stood up, Pandora felt like a child as she dusted away the dirt and grit from her knees and scowling as she notices the scuffs and cuts on the legs of her stealth suit. 

The stealth suit let out a quip about monsters wearing stealth suits but the courier ignored it as she pulled out FIDO and aimed at a sentry bot that she saw was making her way around the corner. The courier cursed internally as the bot began to shoot at her causing her to drop to the floor in a defensive maneuver, she checked her pip-boy VATS before lifting the large gun and firing at the military grade robot. The fight ending with Pandora as the victor as she watched the satisfying sparks fly off of the machine. Soon the courier was jogging into Dr Mobius’s lab, fiddling with a doctor’s bag to try and help with the wounds that robot had caused her. She certainly preferred dealing with super mutants than prewar army robots, at least super mutants didn’t have lasers, well the ones in the Mojave didn’t anyway. Pandora looked up from her poor attempts to bandage herself up on the move to see the floating brain in a jar that was Dr Mobius muttering to himself. ‘Do they ever sleep?’ Her thoughts wondered, she couldn’t recall seeing any of the doctors sleep before. The courier thought for a moment on how to get the doctor’s attention as her hand unconsciously raised a pistol she carried into the air and let out a single shot. ‘You little shit.’ The courier remarked at her brain who, since her first time in the Big MT, had gained the nasty habit of making her body do things without her knowledge. Like the time she ‘tripped’ and kissed Boone just to mess with the pair of them. She snapped out of her thoughts and greeted the brain, moving closer as he began to speak gibberish about something to her.

It took a small while and a couple of mentats for the doctor to be more cognisant, or at least enough to make sense. After a couple of repeated questions and some more time waited for the brain to do what he needed, the courier received a chip for the Auto Doc that sat in the Sink. Pandora’s eyes practically glistened as she looked down upon the chip, she was going to have her voice back for the first time in years. She thanked the doctor before running out of his lab, out of the Forbidden Zone and all the way back to her home on top of the Think Tank, grateful that one of the elevators lead straight there. The mute woman slid through the door and jogged over to the medical machine, pulling open a panel and sliding in the chip into a slot, nearby held the other chips for the Auto Doc. She quickly replaced the panel before waving at the Auto Doc to get him talking his usual lines of trying to sell his services. After confirming she wanted the new operation that it could now perform, she stepped in, closing her eyes as she let the Auto Doc start its job. 

It had been about a month since Pandora visited Big MT, the surgery still a complete secret to her companions while she focused on building her voice’s strength up. The courier made small trips to the now less dangerous Sierra Madre to visit Christine so they could work on their vocal chords together and each day she felt more and more confident in the words her mouth were able to produce. Even still, as the woman sat on the balcony of the Lucky 38 as the sun dipped from the Mojave’s horizon darkening the red sky to an inky dark blue, she couldn’t bring herself to speak to her friends, her voice had cracked a couple of times around them but it wasn’t anything they hadn’t heard before the surgery. Pandora sighed as she took a swig of some random off brand cola that she stumbled upon while scavenging at a store, it was flat but she was used to the drinks lacking the fizz that those of hundreds of years ago knew of. “Come on, Vera… All you have to do is say hi to them… Dumb initiate…” She mocked herself quietly, practically hearing some of the old Citadel paladins insulting her for chickening out on something like this. Usually those words would be kept safe within the confines of her mind but her talkative nature seemed to come back more and more as her voice grew stronger with use. The woman listed her friends’ names off, getting used to the syllables and sounds, just as she had been doing for weeks now before topping at: “Arcade.” Her hands wrung the neck of the glass bottle as she focused on his name. He had been one of the main reasons she had kept going all this time. She needed him and he needed her. They both knew that much. “I’m such an idiot…”

“I don’t think that’s accurate at all. In fact, you’re one of the most intelligent people I know, not many could easily hack into every single terminal in the Mojave or outsmart centuries old systems and minds. Rash? That’s more on the mark. I didn’t know that you could speak now, is that something new?” A male voice sounded out, the person was clearly not impressed at just finding the news out and that made Pandora panic but his presence always calmed her down. Pandora swung her head to look behind her to see the blonde man regarding her gently, only mild irritation in his eyes. “Just for transparency, I’m not mad. Your voice is still a little raspy…” That comment made the courier rub her neck, just above the scar. Pandora lifted her head up to see Arcade walk over before he tilted her head up by her chin so he could get a better look at the pink scar, careful to not stretch the scar tissue too much. It looked slightly irritated, the high collar of the stealth suit most likely being the leading cause but Arcade knew that there was close to no change of convincing his beloved courier to change it for something else. He allowed the fingers of his free hand to brush against the damaged skin gently, noting the subtle heat that it gave off. “Does it hurt?” A small shake from the courier, just like always. “Let me know if it does.” The doctor kept forgetting how often he had said those words to her, each time seemed like he had said it thousands of times before even it it was most likely just under 50 times. A lot of the time Pandora paid so little attention to the scar that everyone almost forgot it was there, almost. “Let’s hear that voice of yours now.” Arcade gave a small, reassuring smile as he stepped back and adjusted his glasses.

Pandora gave the man a small nod before thinking of something to say. ‘A proper introduction would be a good start.’ Her brain proposed, as much as she’d like to leave the past behind her, she needed to be more open with her team if they were to keep this good thing going for many more years to come. The Mojave was theirs to protect, even if the NCR was helping, and they needed transparency to work together better. The courier gave a small shaky sigh before straightening her posture, clutching a hand to her chest in the typical Brotherhood salute before allowing her hand to fall to her side. “My name is Vera Reed. I was born on the 3rd of May in 2249, I was raised in the Capital Wasteland, I grew up training as an Initiate for the Capital Wasteland chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel after my parents were murdered by some Enclave troops in the area. I stopped being an initiate after I ran away, I wondered for a bit before joining forces with an old friend, most call him the Lone Wanderer, I call him Carter. My last days in the Capital were surrounded by slavers before they sold me to the Legion. I think you know the rest.” Pandora took a deep breath, glad to have some of her past out in the air, before leaning back against the railing of the balcony. She was glad she brought up what happened to her parents after they already dealt with the Remnants, she doubted that Arcade would of mentioned them to her if he knew about her bad past with the Enclave.

A few moments went by before Arcade did anything, he wasn’t expecting her to tell him so much, it was a lot more information than his brain was willing to process at that moment of time so he just gave her another small smile before pulling her into a hug. “You didn’t need to tell me your life story, you know. I’m not worth that much attention.” He joked, his hands running through her hair gently, knowing how hard it is to speak about the past. “Let’s let the others know about that noise coming out of your mouth.” He sassed subtly before leading her inside so she could speak to the others. Veronica squealed with excitement when she heard the paladin’s voice, Cass joked about not drinking too much, Raul shared his appreciation for now being able to understand his boss just a bit better, Lily gave the courier a warm, grandmotherly hug, Boone congratulated her with a small blush on his face, ED-E and Rex let out sounds of happiness. It was safe for Pandora to say that her friends liked her voice, she still chose to be silent a lot, being mute was one of her most well known traits this time it was just optional, even at her own wedding to an ex NCR sniper all the while her best man and maid of honour were telling her off for it. This time, this time the Silent Courier, was silent by choice. And she loved having the choice.


End file.
